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Your rhetorical style is very harmful to the people you claim to support. You received criticism for your interactions and you immediately redirected that towar
by HexagonalKitten 6y ago
Your rhetorical style is very harmful to the people you claim to support. You received criticism for your interactions and you immediately redirected that towards hatred for "trans folk" in an effort to smear the person who said it.
> What harm is it to use singular "they"?
That's not what the OP is saying. Because of course there's no harm in any pronoun. But there is societal harm in acting high and mighty about how saying "they" is somehow making a better world and then acting like a prat when called on it.
> regressive labels. ... people will be all sorts of genders. They won't be bound by yesterday's norms.
No, modern twitter activism is just making a bunch of crap up, and this over-concern on properly labelling everyone's gender expression just harms actual transexual people with actual body dysmorphia.
What people who harp on pronouns miss is that pronouns are not used to refer to someone's gender but their sex. I can see your sexual characteristics from across the room, and referring to them is a good way to narrow down who I'm talking about. "That's her there, the tall one in the red dress". Nobody is going to say "That's zir, the one who is only sexually interested when they're romantically attracted to someone, and whose gender expression varies with the weather." Not only is it a bunch of totally irrelevant and inappropriate discussion for most settings, but it's invisible and thus worthless in a referential sense.
The pronoun warriors are invariably not sexually dysmorphic, they're just deconstructing their parent's mores. They're today's goths, not some miraculous new human evolution. If they manage to do something new and valuable - if for instance Harry Styles actually looked good in a dress - all they'd end up doing is expanding the normal dress code for men, they wouldn't actually be creating a new identity. And this isn't helpful because society explores these things (copying elements of one sex's traditional styles in the other sex's new style, etc) via fashion designers and manages to do it without attacking each other's moral character and making queer/intersex people into political pawns.
> It seems like you dislike trans folk. I'm not sure what they did to hurt you, but I suspect your fears and hate are the result of conditioning.
If they had displayed any hate, and they did not, it would have been caused by conditioning from vocal jerks, not from trans people living their lives.
> Would you be a stuffy gender policeperson, or will you just let people be who they are?
Okay, in what way are people not already 100% allowed to express their gender? (In the USA, Canada, etc...)
To someone in the Q-adjacent community who has been through Tumbler and Twitter, you're incredibly transparent. Everything you say is divisive, rude, harmful because it distracts from actual problems, and because it makes this nonsense seem important. You're clearly a justice warrior, not someone who works for justice.
> You've got a lot of fear and anger. Reflect on it. Let it go.
And you're doing this in the name of a community who was doing just fine on their own. Trust people to speak for themselves. Don't pick fights in their name.
Since the LGBTQ institutions have been taken over by the woke they've pushed gendered nonsense and the public isn't blind. Mental breakdowns over pronouns, putting men in women's prisons, etc. Your behavior here is part of a pattern that has reduced LGB acceptance over the last few years, and while Trans acceptance is superficially up, it's at the cost of hateful wars against transexuals, for instance.
I know an ~60yo MTF who was savagely attacked online, under their actual name, for saying that they were tranSEXual because they knew they were biologically male and wanted to be a woman. They were told their language was hateful and they were "killing us!" even though they nearly lost their job, and were being bullied in a way that actually causes people to kill themselves. This is an actual person who spent the last four decades living as the other sex, fighting actual discrimination back in the day, and the mob wanted to cut them down for not toeing the woke line.
The effect of this allyship is similar to Portland, where white Antifa activists are using BLM as an excuse to riot. There's a 'funny' video of a black officer saying he's been racially insulted more during the BLM riots than in their entire career before that. He continues to say that every time a black person tried to speak to him - to ask about his actual views and rational for being an officer - that white BLMers come and physically block their interaction. The rioters don't want anyone to find a middle ground and solve anything because they're using black people to justify their anarchist cosplay. "Oregon Public Broadcasting reports Wednesday that black members of Portland’s Black Lives Matter movement are tired of their anti-racism demonstrations being hijacked by the mostly white “Antifa” anarchists and are working to separate the two movements as protests continue."
Similarly, I've never seen the pronoun police display actual concern for anything other than their ability to control people.
Reflect. Stop. Thanks.
- antonfire 6y ago> What people who harp on pronouns... Mental breakdowns over pronouns... pronoun police To my eyes, in this thread, the person who is harping on pronouns the most, seems to be closest to having a mental breakdown over them, who can most accurately be described as "pronoun police", and who shows the greatest explicit tendency to control others' use of pronouns, is also the person who in the first place corrected an in-the-wild usage of singular "them" to "him". Like, can we step back and look at the thread and say that yeah, sometimes maybe it's the people who are pushing back against singular "they" that are blowing the thing out of proportion? > I've never seen the pronoun police display actual concern for anything other than their ability to control people. If you're open to a real example, the "pronoun police" at my workplace suggest that when writing about hiring candidates, we use singular "they" instead of "he" or "she", in order not to call too much attention to the gender of that person when those evaluations are read by decision makers. The intent is to reduce any possible gender bias in hiring. This to me reads like an actual concern for something other than one's ability to control people, namely a concern for being more objective and unbiased in hiring decisions. (Or at least, if you want to be cynical about it, for seeming more objective and unbiased in hiring decisions.)
- antonfire 6y agoOh, also, regarding > What people who harp on pronouns miss is that pronouns are not used to refer to someone's gender but their sex. I can see your sexual characteristics from across the room, and referring to them is a good way to narrow down who I'm talking about. The thing you see about someone when you look at them from across the room isn't their biological sex, if anything it's their gender presentation. This chunk of youtube video (https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI?t=548 https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI?t=548) talks more or less about that.
- HexagonalKitten 6y agoYou seem like you intend to be helpful, but I don't think you're as surrounded by these politics, or the disingenuous arguments, as I am. imho, Contrapoints is a homophobic monster who supports shaming people with "genital preferences" (ie, gays and lesbians.) If you want a sane person who just happens to be trans, try Rose of Dawn. They're honest and sincere. Bair White is also reasonable, and often gets threats and hate from the community for being unwilling to join in the nonsense. Ultimately the rift comes down to lying. Do we have to deny truth to be kind? I say no, and I'll leave this rough paraphrasing of Blair. "Am I male, yes. Of course. I'm a transwoman and I wouldn't be trans if I already was female. Do I wish I wasn't, yes. But am I offended, no?" As for Contrapoint's "seeing gender", that's just simply not the case. For one thing, I grew up when boys were allowed to like pink, so most of people's signifiers don't stand out to me. I'm super behind being sensitive, but if you're six inches taller than the others, have a beard, or breasts, etc, those are sex linked traits. Not size entirely of course, but often enough that the 10% male is larger than the 90% female. It's gaslighting to assume we can't differentiate between the sexes.